


Hard Truth

by quigonejinn



Category: Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-14
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-29 05:24:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/683319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You know the story of how your parents met and fell in love.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hard Truth

**Author's Note:**

> Cracktastic, I know. Cribs heavily from S1E2 of _The Americans_. 
> 
> No non-con or dubcon, but if you have violence or family-related triggers, please proceed with caution.

1\. 

You know the story of how your parents met and fell in love: a rainy spring day in Midtown. They got into a cab at the same time from opposite sides, and it turned out they were heading in the same direction. Splitting the fare turned into splitting the check at dinner turned into a long, hand-in-hand walk up Park Avenue. They were married in City Hall two weeks later in front of his office mate and his secretary. A romantic whirlwind. For years, there is a clipping you keep in the desk of whatever apartment or dorm room you're living in. Sandwiched between thin, carefully cut sheets of cardboard to keep it from wrinkling: a photocopy of a picture in the photocopied office newsletter, announcing the marriage and congratulating the happy couple. 

Your mother looks young, small, like the small town girl new to the big city that she was. She has a hand on your father's chest. He is much taller than her, and he looks deliriously happy. He seems to have an idea of how lucky he was, an office guy, just a paper pusher at the State Department, getting a real love story like this. 

Even before your father shot her and shot himself and tried to burn the house down, it wasn't a happy marriage. 

2\. 

You have a memory of being thirteen and wanting to have your ears pierced. You asked for permission to have it done at the mall; your dad was angry for a reason you didn't understand and said you weren't allowed to. You wanted to know why he hated you. Things escalated from there. The next morning was Saturday, and when your dad had slammed out of the house because he'd remembered something he needed to do urgently at the office in the city, your mother came into your room. 

"Do you still want to get your ears pierced?" 

"Yes," you said, sort of -- hesitating. Not sure. Not quite confident how to take this. 

"I can drive you to the mall, or we can do it at home." 

You were sulking on the floor where you had been staring at an old newspaper; there was a dressing mirror next to your bed. You remember your surprise when she said do it at home. She was offering, and when you looked up, you saw her framed in first the mirror, then the doorway, small, red-haired, clear-eyed, watching you. 

After you have your first fight with the man you'll end up marrying, who'll be the father of your children, you try to explain why you have a certain kind of -- a kind of anxiety. Your mother, you explain, was small, red-haired, fine-boned, with cool eyes. She was athletic, which you aren't. She had a head for numbers, which you don't have. You have no memory of her ever being lost or disoriented; you have difficulty finding your way through a movie theater in the dark. While you're trying to explain this, you pause to keep yourself from crying. Again, you look up. This time, you find your boyfriend is looking back, confused. At this point, you've only been dating him for four weeks. Consequently, you say: all that, and my dad still left her. 

He gets the real story another five months down the line, before the two of you get serious. He cries; you cry. He apologizes for pushing you about how serious this thing was; you apologize for lying to him. 

Still, you wait six years to marry him. 

3\. 

To be honest, your mother was not a warm person. She was, in general, not particularly interested in being your mother or your father's wife. It was why the ear-piercing stuck out in your memory: here was a time when she put her hands on you and helped you and touched you. You remember sitting on the bed with her after the needle went through and looking at the mirror on the side of the room, where you could see your face, your mother's face, the expanding dot of red on the gauze she was holding to your ear, the sunlight through both of your hair, her right leg tucked around your back and her left leg hanging down along your left leg. 

It's one of the warmest memories of your childhood with her. Generally, your father was your preferred parent, and he was afraid of her to the point where, even as a kid, you could tell that he avoided being home. You asked him once, on the way to ballet lessons, why if things were so bad, they didn't just get a divorce? And your father gripped the wheel and stared ahead. 

You remember, you remember -- 

4a. 

At the police station, you're sitting in a conference room with a social worker on one side of you and two detectives in front of you and a chipped table in between. It's friendlier than the interrogation room, right? Less threatening to a sixteen year old girl who had just lost her father and mother and the only home she knew. Your father's mother is flying in from Sacramento to take care of you; she'll be here in the morning. You've seen her all four times in your life. 

Maybe five. 

The police detectives ask if your father abused your mother. If your father ever hit your mother. If you knew there was a gun in the house. 

(The answers are no, no, because your mother wouldn't have stood for it, and no.) 

"What time did you call?" 

"A little after six."

"What did you ask?" 

"If I could stay at my boyfriend's for dinner." 

There is a long, long moment of silence: the Cohens had given you a ride home, then driven you to the police station. They stayed out front for hours, just hours, just them, not your boyfriend, Alex. They finally went home after midnight when the sergeant told them they'd call when you were free to go -- half past ten or so, it takes one of the detectives plus a uniformed cop to restrain you when, after looking at the face of the social worker, after deciphering the expression on both of the detective's faces, you explode across the conference table, screaming, thrashing, clawing, tears rolling faster down your face than you thought it was possible for them to flow. You thought you had cried yourself out, but apparently, you had plenty in reserve: you have a right to know, you shout. They have to tell you, you say, your voice loud in the small room.

Had your father been in the house when you called? Did he have a gun pointed at your mother while you were talking to her? 

Did your mother save your life by telling you, after a slight pause, in a distracted voice, yes, you could stay at Alex's? 

Nothing could rattle your mother, you'd always thought. It was one of the jokes that you and your dad used to share. 

4b. 

Where would your father even get a gun? Would he even know how to get one, and if he did, would he know how to fire it? He worked at the State Department, issuing visas and interviewing the occasional applicant for political asylum. He took MetroNorth to and from work on weekdays; on weekends, he drove into the city. He was tall and brown-haired and wore glasses; your mother had red hair and was small and slight, but surprisingly strong. Nothing rattled her, and your parents had met on a rain spring day in -- 

Why would your father do it? 

It was an unhappy marriage. Twenty-five years on, you'll admit this. 

Once the fire department puts the flames out, they find two bodies in the house. In the kitchen, one female body, small, slight, reduced to carbon and heavily charred major bones. Shot multiple times, then most likely wrapped in curtains doused in gasoline, likely from the lawnmower in garage. The clothes match your mother's; the dental records match your mother's. In the study, one male body, taller, only partially burned. Dental records weren't even necessary, but before he shot himself, your father gathered and burned every single family photograph in the house. 

4c. 

You remember: you and your father, sitting in the front of the Pontiac in the park, windows down, cheeseburgers in each of your laps, happy to be with each other and out of the house. 

You remember: you, somehow overcoming teenage stupidity and telling your mother that you wanted her to pierce your ears. She considered you for a moment, then came back with a tray of ice cubes and a needle and some vodka that you didn't know they had in the house, plus two little stainless steel earrings and a black permanent marker . 

"Is this how they did your ears?" you said, holding an ice cube to your left ear. 

"In a way," she says, considering your right ear in the mirror. "I didn't have a choice." 

5\. 

Twenty-five years on, you -- haven't gotten over it. Who gets over something like your father shooting your mother and then setting the house on fire and then killing himself? No motive has ever been explained to you except that it was an unhappy marriage; about two years afterwards, somebody wrote a book, suggesting that your father had a mistress in the city and that your mother found out about it. That reason feels wrong to you, in your bones, but you don't have a better explanation: instead, you've accepted that your father shot your mother. You've accepted that your father set the house on fire. 

You've accepted that you liked your father more than your mother, who sometimes frightened you. You accept your feeling of guilt. 

It isn't easy, but you learn what you think are hard truths. In the time it takes you to learn them, your grandmother raises you; you go to college. You get a PhD in British literature; when you are thirty-one, you marry your boyfriend of six years. You get a position at the University of California, San Francisco, and sometime between having your first child and getting tenure, you accept these truths. 

One cloudy morning, you've unplugged the ethernet cord from your desktop because you need to make progress on this bibliography when one of your grad students bangs on your door. "Manhattan," she gasps out. "Prof, you have to see this." 

You get out of your chair, and you follow her across the hall to the office that the grad students share: there are things that look like aliens blowing up Midtown, and in a streaming video window with grainy footage and the CNN logo in the corner, you see, live, your mother, red-haired looking no older than when you were sixteen, firing guns at things that don't move as though they're human. 

6\. 

"So, uh, can I stay over at Alex's for dinner? We still have some, uh, homework to do." 

The other end of the telephone line is quiet for a moment, and you frown, worried. You chew your lip. Through the telephone, standing in your boyfriend's family's kitchen, you hear a sound that could be thousand different things -- raindrop on a window, a door closing, the sound of safety being pulled back. Maybe even the sound of a father, tied up on the floor of his study, but desperate to warn his daughter. 

Through the telephone, standing in your kitchen and your father's kitchen, your mother hears a television. Laughter. An older brother yelling at his younger brother to stop messing around. A mother telling both of them to be quiet. 

_Is this how they did your ears?_

_In a way._

This time, on the phone, even though she knows she'll pay for it, your mother makes a choice.


End file.
